4 comments:

This one has affected my mood in the most complex way possible. Just reading the poem and looking at the pictures, I don’t know whether to feel poised and optimistic about things around the corner or mired in gloom. Learning a bit about the poem’s background lifts me a little but leaves me anchored here in semi-sylvan solitary, but just down the road from the German corner store. I think I’ll try to take my cue from the bird (goose?) spreading its wings at top. I-phones can take remarkable photos, but it’s still all in the photographer’s eye and hand. Curtis

Curtis, this photographer's work tells more about the cold and dark of a northern winter, the feeling of reality of the place and season, than words alone could do. Still I couldn't escape the sense there is a great deal of cultural memory hid within these images.

Duncan, I've had the Winterreise in my head these past weeks while visiting the work of some excellent German and Austrian photographers of winter scenes. And it may be that not only you and I but more than one of these photographers have been hearing it.

Robert Peters, writing in 2000 of the first section of the cycle, and of the whole cycle, speaks of "a demonic quality... more and more the wanderer becomes a sheer medium for a lament, a pain which is bigger than the actual cause, bigger than life, which means more, much more than just the broken heart of one single person. The cycle (and the poem Gute Nacht, too) shows a human being who is totally given over to despair and loss, who is utterly helpless. The man's pain is not temporary, it is total, absolute. And the Romantik is about the absolute, the total. This is weird, this is fascinating, this is very frightening."

The theatrical presentation in the video might seem to support that sort of reading.

On the other hand, a pianist, Tatiana Rakovski, commenting on the Bostridge/Drake performance, suggests that the intensity of the lyric might call for a counter in terms of restraint in performance:

"I sing Schubert and know his music pretty well. So, let me say one thing. I don`t think that Schubert`s music can be characterized as gloomy. This is a very flat determination. Speaking of 'Winterreise', I can describe the main tone of music as coldness, winter emptiness, with some delicate shade of German melancholy. The piano accompaniment profoundly expresses this cold soul of winter, so there`s no use to double the effect by singing in a suffering and deserted manner. It`s too much."

In any case, that phrase "cold soul of winter" comes quite near to characterizing the feeling I take away from these remarkable photos.